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He told the Independent last year: “The human failing I would most like to correct is aggression.

“It may have had survival advantage in caveman days, to get more food, territory, or partner with whom to reproduce, but now it threatens to destroy us all.”

And he warned about global warming.

“We don’t know where global warming will stop,” he said. “But the worst case scenario is that Earth will become like its sister planet Venus with a temperature of 250C and raining sulfuric acid. The human race could not survive in those conditions.”

And Prof Hawking warned that genetically engineered viruses could wipe out entire populations.

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He said it could be only a matter of time before antibiotic-resistant viruses that we never imagined could exist actually develop.

He also signed an open letter warning that artificial intelligence weapons could create “a global arms race”.

The letter read: “Artificial Intelligence technology has reached a point where the deployment of such systems is - practically if not legally - feasible within years, not decades, and the stakes are high: autonomous weapons have been described as the third revolution in warfare, after gunpowder and nuclear arms”.

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He said: “We are not going to stop making progress, or reverse it, so we have to recognize the dangers and control them.

“I’m an optimist, and I believe we can.”

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